Emotions are carefully measured and sentimentality is in short supply in My Name Is Lucy Barton, the very fine (and very faithful) stage adaptation of Elizabeth Strout’s mother-daughter–focused novel.
“No-one could isolate any bacteria or figure out what had gone wrong,” says Lucy (Laura Linney, who will smash your heart to bits with a single word: mommy), standing in the hospital where an appendectomy turned into a nine-week stay. “No-one ever did.” No anger, no bitterness, no frustration with the American health care system—just the verbal equivalent of a shoulder shrug.
Speaking of her childhood in the “tiny rural town of Amgash, Illinois”—distressed farmland where there was “no beauty for the eye to rest upon”—Lucy is similarly frank: “We did not have a television. We did not have newspapers or magazines. We did not have books.” A frequent family dinner was bread with molasses.
[Read Steven Suskin’s ★★★★☆ review here.]
Yet when Lucy’s mother—also played by Linney, only by adopting a ramrod-straight posture and that indisputable Midwestern drone (sorry, Mom!)—arrives for an unexpected hospital visit, they don’t reminisce about the big stuff. How they all lived in one room—the garage—until Lucy’s great uncle died; then they moved into the adjacent house, which afforded such luxuries as hot water and a flushing toilet. (“But often it was still very cold,” says Lucy. “Always, I have hated being cold.” Mom probably did too; perhaps that’s why she’s always pulling at her sweater, trying to wrap herself up tighter.) They don’t discuss Lucy’s wedding, which her parents didn’t attend, or her two daughters, whom her parents haven’t met. And as much as it weighs on her, Lucy doesn’t dredge up her most painful memory: being locked in her father’s truck. “The dirt-streaked windows, the tilt of the windshield, the grime on the dashboard, the smell of diesel gas and rotting apples, and dogs.… I remember pounding on the glass of the windows, screaming. I did not think I would die, I don’t think I thought anything, it was just terror, realizing that no one was to come, and watching the sky get darker, and feeling the cold start in. Always I screamed and screamed. I cried until I could hardly breathe.” She was, she recalls, “probably no more than five years old.”
For Lucy, it’s easier, and actually more comforting, to let her mother yammer on about everyone and everything else. (Isn’t it always?) Kathie Nicely—“goodness she came to a bad end,” says her mother. “The thing about Kathie Nicely … I don’t know how nice she really was.” She discusses her worrywart cousin Harriet, whose husband “dropped dead in the street” and “left her nothing, poor woman.” Harriet’s son, Abel, married “quite a hoity-toity”; and his sister, Dottie, “poor Dottie,” had her husband run out on her. “He was from the East,” sniffs Lucy’s mother, dropping a not-so-subtle reference to her Massachusetts-raised son-in-law. “Thought he was just a tiny bit better than she was, probably.” But the best losing-a-husband story—and there are a lot of them—is definitely the tale of Mississippi Mary, the “cute as the dickens” former head cheerleader. I won’t spoil it for you.
Theirs isn’t an I-love-you-to-the-moon-and-back relationship. Theirs is: “Mommy do you love me?” “When your eyes are closed.” When things get too serious—when Lucy’s doctor tells her she might need surgery—mom high-tails it back to LaGuardia. But Rona Munro’s play—and Strout’s book—is more about what’s not said: what happens when our eyes are closed, what happens when we’re thousands of miles (and worlds away) from our family.
My Name Is Lucy Barton opened Jan. 15, 2020, and runs through Feb. 29. Tickets and information: lucybartonplay.com
